Transcript of a talk on online advertising and related issues of crucial importance in today’s world. Definitely worth reading. I don’t endorse every opinion (especially near the end), but it’s all part of an important conversation.

Mark Rosenfelder’s book on China is out. I helped with the cover illustration, which uses a photograph taken by my mother. We’re each getting a free copy.

I’m (sort of) writing a book of my own. It’s the children’s poem I wrote years ago and started illustrating, but this time with someone else doing the illustrations. It’s not a commercial publication. There’s a lot more I could say — and feel free to ask — but otherwise I’ll reveal all early next year.

A November ritual is choosing a wall calendar for the following year. Readers may recall that I have a collection to which I add one calendar a year, and that each year I choose a theme I’ve never had before. For 2016 I’ve chosen “Australian Waterfalls” and I am very happy with that decision.

I wrote a couple of random thoughts on Google Plus (here and here), in case you want to add anything.

Before I share my favourite links from the last month, I have a little personal news to share. I spent the period from the 24th to the 27th of September catching up with family, including relatives from other parts of the country. Each day had its own special event — a school concert and school play that some of my relatives were part of, a seven-year-old’s birthday party, and my nephew’s baptism.

Here is an ultra-cute video of my niece (in the pink) with a friend on the trampoline. It was recorded at my sister’s place at lunch on the 27th.

I liked this idea: Venn diagram poetry, mostly because I think it would be an interesting challenge to write your own.

Thirty minute radio segment on selective mutism. I have more to say about this below.

Enlightening article on the cultural context of the British piggate scandal.

I’d like to add a few comments to the item on selective mutism. It’s not something I’ve experienced directly, but learning about other people’s experiences — through documentaries and so forth — always takes my thoughts and emotions in interesting directions. It evokes memories of experiences that, while not the same as selective mutism, serve as analogies that I can draw on to understand it better. And it makes me fantasise about what I’d say to the people whose stories I hear if I could meet them in their past.

I’ll share one memory as an example. I was raised in a religious household, and during my teenage years I was Christian myself, but I never joined in the ritual of saying grace before a meal. I remember one day when my parents expressed their wish that I would, to which I said something like “I think I could if– if– if– …” and faltered. My parents reacted poorly to that, telling me I shouldn’t bargain with them, but the words I couldn’t get out that day were: “I think I could if you promise not to overreact, not to make a big deal out of it, not to make me feel like the centre of unwanted attention.”

When I think of selective mutism, I think of that memory and others like it, and multiply them by a thousand in my mind. The analogy is far from perfect, but it’s something — a seed of connection around which further empathy and understanding can be built.

I also think of the song Across the Waters by Jimmy Gregory (from the 1996 album West Along the Road). The song is really about lovers who are separated geographically, and celebrates the fact that, however much they miss each other, their love is strong enough to withstand being apart. But I feel the following excerpt could just as easily be about selective mutism, and in that context is extremely poignant:

There’s a strength in the silence between usStill waters run deep.There’s an ocean of words that I’d say to youBut sure all of them will keep.

In those words I hear an acknowledgement of the turmultous emotions and intense desire to communicate that lies beneath the silence of selective mutism, along with an assurance that there is no pressure: that it is OK if today is not a day when words can be spoken. Do you agree? What do they evoke for you?

If I was trying to build rapport with someone suffering from selective mutism — trying to create an environment where they could feel comfortable and understood — then between the song lyrics, the memories, and the willingness to learn, I like to think I’d have something to offer. Though the opportunity to show it would come less easily in life than in my fantasies. Comments will be gratefully received, especially from readers who have been there.

In one browser tab, open this page (featuring a twenty-minute super-slowed version of the original Doctor Who theme music that I linked to some time ago).

In another brower tab, open this page (featuring a five-minute silent video of images generated by Google’s neural network; for more information see the links I shared last month).

Start the first video playing, quickly switch to the second tab, start that video playing, and set it to full screen mode.

Stare at the screen and allow yourself to become fully immersed.

Seriously, you must try this. It’s an amazing combination, a massage for your brain. The only disappointment is that the neural network demonstration is only five minutes long, and you’ll find yourself wishing it lasted the same twenty minutes as the soundtrack.

Now onto other links. There was, of course, the recent encounter between New Horizons and Pluto. Here is a comparison between our new view of Pluto and the view from Hubble that was, until recently, the best we had.

Compared to Triton, Pluto is less jewel-like from a distance, but makes up for it in topography. Close-up images (like this or this — two perspectives on the same region) reveal mountain ranges comparable in size with those on Earth but formed by some entirely different process, and flat plains that resemble a beach at low tide. (I don’t remember anyone predicting we’d find a beach resort on Pluto, although here’s a prediction worth mentioning.) According to the science, there are nitrogen glaciers. And the best is still to come.

Long article on helping people at the end of a long prison sentence (I didn’t actually read all of this, because it requires more emotional investment that I’ve had time for, but from the portion I read it looks worth the effort).

Maryn McKenna’s TED talk on antibiotic resistance is information every adult in society needs to know. Its only fault is that a lot more is omitted.

There are two personal items I’d like to discuss, so I’ll begin with the first, follow it with selected links from around the Web, and finish with the second item. Both involve some kind of appeal for assistance, although one more so than the other.

The first concerns a card game I invented, and that we playtested at my birthday party last month.

[Update: This first request has been answered. I have shortened the text below to reflect this.]

My birthday was June 12, but for reasons pertaining to Dad’s recent retirement, it was one week later that a small celebratory gathering took place. There were five people present: a friend, an uncle, my parents, and myself (unfortunately, the uncle had to leave early). I left most of the organising and decision-making to my parents, but playtesting a card game was my one explicit request.

The game was one that I invented and blogged about in 2011, but at the time it was a work in progress and the rules yet to be fully refined. But recently I took it off the backburner, made a few small adjustments, and updated my original blog post accordingly.

The twist is that this is not a game you can play with the familiar deck of hearts, diamonds, spades and clubs. Rather it is designed for Ganjifa — traditional playing cards from India that are typically circular rather than rectangular with at least 96 cards per deck. Regrettably they are used for only a handful of games and even those are dying out. I don’t care too much about the traditional games, but it’s a pity that the cards themselves lack a living tradition of new games being invented. The world could do with more Ganjifa games, and the game I’ve invented is my contribution to that end.

Here’s where my appeal to the Internet comes in — because the one thing I have not managed to do is decide on a name for the game. Since it is played with Indian cards, I feel that giving it an Indian name would be an appropriate tribute to the culture that created them, and have been appealing for help from people who know Indian languages and are interested in helping to name a new card game.

If you can help, or know someone who probably can, I would greatly appreciate it. I’ve suggested the name केंद्र कड़ी (crudely: Kendra Kari) for reasons outlined in my Google Plus post, but I really require informed human feedback and not just the results of automated translation tools.

A while ago, just for fun, I decided to see if I could guess an approximate formula for time dilation in general relativity. I didn’t expect to be right, but using a combination of high school physics, Ockham’s Razor, and a few elementary facts, I gave it my best shot.

So I was genuinely delighted to discover later that my result checks out against real-world examples!

This page on Quora has a couple of obvious faults (the biggie is that the altitude of the ISS varies between 330 and 435 kilometres according to Wikipedia, so calculating a result to so many significant figures makes no sense), but the relevant formula corresponds closely to mine. Moreover, plugging their result into my formula puts the ISS in the right range — at about 375 kilometres. Another example I found is that time goes faster by 10 nanoseconds per year for every floor you go up in a building; again, my formula checks out, putting the difference between floors at a very reasonable three metres.

I am no genius (trust me on this), but in all the popular science I’ve read, I have never seen anyone mention that an approximate but workable formula for time dilation in general relativity is astonishingly easy to guess. Feeling that I’d stumbled on an angle that popular writers have missed but would be useful to others, I decided to write up my results as an article of my own. Please remember this is an un-factchecked draft, and I am no more an expert than the target reader, but you learn by doing. It’s written in the style of a popular science article, and is 1000 words long.

If any real popular physics writer reads this — I would love to hear your feedback. Also, you are welcome to take inspiration for your own blog posts, and I hope you will be so kind as to send me a link if you do. A tweet to @GoldHoarder will do nicely.

(Incidentally, I used a free PDF converter, so the links don’t work, but since they’re fully spelt out they won’t slow you down very much. Since it’s a draft, I find this acceptable.)

On 28 May, my parents and I took my niece to Cleland Wildlife Park for her second birthday (she was born on 26 May 2013). I’ll share more anecdotes about that day if you ask, but for now, here are some photos of Elke with koalas and wallabies. More family interaction followed the next day, including some errand-running. Of particular importance to me was that I finally got my mobile phone fixed, after errant software had been draining the batteries since late last year. When the phone was new, the battery lost on average less than 5% capacity for every 8 hours of normal (i.e. mostly idle) use, and now that it is fixed I can confirm that it loses only marginally more than that. Given that it’s more than a year old and the battery has never been replaced, this must count as excellent. While it was broken, I was lucky to get two days out of it.

The Reddit AMA with Mike Brown is worth a browse if you have the time, but you’ll need to expand all the subthreads to get the most out of it, and that’s tedious, so I’ll understand if you give it a miss. I thought the thread would be automatically expanded to show all comments by the guest of honour, but no such luck.

The sounds in this video were generated from the solar wind. I strongly advise listening with headphones. With the volume reasonably low and your eyes closed, it’s probably suitable for meditation.

I recently bought a couple of drinks from a local bottle shop, because I enjoy experimenting with cocktails from time to time, subject to the constraints of fridge space and affordability. The drinks I chose were Frangelico and a small bottle of Baileys. Meanwhile I’ve used up the last of my Opal Nera.

From the Internet I see that the cocktail consisting of Opal Nera and Baileys (layered 50/50) is traditionally known as “Black Nipple”, but the name that came to my mind was “Elephant Hide”. The Opal Nera spontaneously spouts up into the layer of Baileys above it, creating a dynamic swirling pattern with the Baileys resembling grey elephant skin and the Opal Nera its dark wrinkles. I think the ideal ratio is 3 parts Opal Nera to 4 parts Baileys. It tastes fine (Baileys with an extra oomph) but the appeal is primarily visual.

There are several notable things to report on this month, though unusually, that doesn’t translate to a lot of links to share.

You’ve probably heard the news that Terry Pratchett died recently. I’ve been a fan my whole adult life, and this feels like the end of an era. There’s an official announcement here, plus various news reports, opinion pieces and tributes all over the Internet. Many are well worth your time, but I’m more inclined to encourage readers to look around than link to anything specific. There’s one last book to be published posthumously (confession: I’ve never read any of the Tiffany Aching books).

My sister’s second child, Elliot Roger Smith, was born around 11:15 on Wednesday March 11. I have yet to meet my new nephew, but I hear all is well, even if his big sister has some adjusting to do.

I now have over a thousand WordPress users subscribing to this blog. This means little, because the overwhelming majority are follow spam — people who follow other blogs indiscriminantly either in the hope that it will get them some attention or because they’re the blogging equivalent of hoarders — but there must be some who subscribed because they genuinely looked at my blog and liked what they saw. If that’s you, I encourage you to make yourself known in the comments. Tell me who you are and what you found here that you liked.

The Gede Ruins in Kenya are famous not only as a historical site but also for its wildlife (especially the monkeys), and a community organisation that helps to protect the site is now using a logo that I designed (though someone else drew the animal outlines). For a few months they were rather cheekily using a draft version that I only sent — along with some other designs — to show how things were progressing, but I don’t know the whole story behind that decision, and the completed version is in use now.

Now here are some links. Not many this month (for whatever reason I’ve not seen a lot recently that compels me to archive it) but I hope you enjoy them.

Debunking of viral archery video. I’m linking to this because a few years ago I linked to another video making some of the debunked claims.

I also spent some time playing with the soundscape generators at mynoise.net. The site contains some mysticism I don’t endorse, but the generators are a lot of fun. Each soundscape has a number of components, the volume of which can be set independently. You can then share that customised soundscape by clicking the “Save in URL” link, or manually once you understand how the numbers in the URL work (it’s pretty straightforward). The animation mode adjusts the settings dynamically, and I’m not sure what the algorithm is but components that start low stay low.

The first generator I played with was Rain Noise. Where do you feel you are when you listen to that? Perhaps you’re caught in a storm whilst bushwalking, and sheltering in a cave, listening not only to the rain and the thunder but also the gurgling of a nearby river. I also played with Jungle Life and Beatae Memoriae (a spooky church/cathedral). The reason my “rain” settings are so much louder than the others is that for the latter two I used headphones. Anyway, see what you can discover, and feel free to share your favourite settings here.

My boycott of sites featuring autoplay advertising ends in just a few more days, and I have my eye on a couple of articles to share in my next collection. But they can wait.